Into Africa

While Goggin was learning about AIDS firsthand, bad ideas about the virus were spreading. People didn't understand how it was transmitted, and they were scared. One day, Goggin came home to find her father arguing with a conservative friend. She remembers how her father ended the conversation: "You try to stop her from going there, then!"

• Courtesy of Kathleen Goggin

  

  University of Missouri professors are conducting research at South Africa's Edendale Hospital.

• Courtesy of Kathleen Goggin

  

Details:

UMKC's Kathy Goggin explains in the Pitchcast how she went from growing up in the center of the AIDS epidemic to researching drugs used by African witch doctors. Listen to it here or in iTunes.

And click here to listen to Goggin’s interview on KCUR 89.3.

Subject(s):

Kathy Goggin, Bill Folk, Makhosi Mhlongo, AIDS research, sutherlandia, UMKC, South Africa

Nobody did. She spent more time with the Franciscan, often complaining that no one was helping the patients — particularly the churches and the government.

Then the Franciscan took her aside and told her, very calmly, that the Catholic Church had paid for the hospice and given it to him. Church leaders wouldn't be sending any more help, though, and they didn't want anyone to know they'd been involved.

The news that the church had funded the hospice just made her more angry.

"I got pissed. I'm still pissed."

Goggin went to California State University and studied psychology. After graduation, she went on to work in clinical trials because she thought that was where she could help HIV-AIDS patients most directly and see the most concrete results. On the side, she helped set up AIDS awareness programs and did what she could to educate people about prevention.

She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1994 and went on to work as a researcher at New York Hospital in New York City. Though AIDS infection rates at the time were holding steady among gay men, they were rising in the general population of blacks. There, working on AIDS-prevention projects, she'd seen how churches were the centers of the black community, but church leaders had trouble finding ways to educate people about the virus. She wrote health surveys as a way to open the door to talking about AIDS, which was on the rise among black youth but was an uncomfortable thing to talk about, given its connection to premarital sex, drug use and homosexuality.

(Today, Kansas City health officials who work with AIDS patients say infection rates are rising across all demographics, including blacks and certain groups of gay men who regard the disease as an infection that can be lived with. In the metro, new HIV diagnoses rose from 193 cases in 2002 to 273 cases in 2006, a 41 percent increase.)

Goggin took a job as an assistant professor at UMKC and moved to Kansas City in 1997. She lives in Lee's Summit with her husband, Delwyn Catley, also an associate professor of psychology at UMKC, who researches how people quit smoking. They have a 2-year-old daughter.

Almost immediately after arriving here, Goggin started working in territory unfamiliar to her — though not as far away as Africa.

The Rev. Eric Williams met Goggin almost a decade ago, at a week of prayer events focusing on AIDS in black churches. She was at a meeting of church pastors, all of whom were discussing ways to talk about the disease with their congregations.

Williams believes in getting things out in the open, and here was this 6-foot-2 redheaded white woman talking almost manically about AIDS outreach in the black community.

"All right, let's just get this out of the way right now," he said. "Does anyone have a problem with Kathy doing this because she's white?"

No one did.

Williams had some experience being the outsider, too. He has been the pastor of the Calvary Temple Baptist Church at 29th Street and Holmes for 17 years. A bald man with flecks of white in his goatee and a gold cross around his neck, he places his hands together as if he's saying a prayer when he speaks and he answers most questions with stories. He was one of the first black pastors in Kansas City to perform services for people who had died of AIDS, starting 15 years ago, when he received a call from a mortuary attendant.

A young man, very active in his church, had died of AIDS. Williams won't name names now but says the pastor of the man's church had refused the service. It wasn't an uncommon thing. Williams admits to making a few Adam and Steve jokes in his younger days, too. Or, even worse, figuring that God might be using the virus to punish gays for their sins.

"We're used to hearing 'If the son's gay, kick 'em out,'" Williams says. "Heaven forbid you bring AIDS into this house. So you see fathers abandoning gay sons. This family, they showed this kid so much love and acceptance even in death. It really sparked something in me and let me know we had to do something."

For a while after that, many pastors wouldn't talk to Williams. He'd hear them calling him "the AIDS man." At meetings among pastors, others would leave the table when he sat down.

Williams had also been contacting UMKC doctors and other medical professors in the metro to try to get some advice about educating his parishioners on HIV and what resources were available to them. He wasn't having much luck.

"People always talk about the church being silent on AIDS, but the truth is, the academic community can be just as bad. There were a lot of unreturned phone calls," Williams says. "Kathy provided a bridge there."